Understanding Media in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water

Plastic Shaman in the Global Village: Understanding Media in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water BRIAN JOHNSON HOMAS KING’S Green Grass, Running Water (1993) is keenly attuned to the complex relationship between imperialism and T communication. Historically, this relationship has been under- stood in terms of the meeting of oral and literate cultures and the ways in which literacy was employed as a tool by imperial powers in the de- struction or subjugation of indigenous peoples and cultures. As Terry Goldie suggests, “the division between writing white and oral indigene is on the level of a different episteme …. Orality provides the white ob- server with both a manifestation of and a definition of Otherness” (110). In the encounter between European settlers and First Nations peoples the mode of communication thus provided a determining marker of difference which simultaneously constituted colonial “knowledge” about native inferiority and justified the practice of domination in the name of the civilizing mission. Moreover, the introduction of writing was an important colonial strategy because “writing does not merely introduce a communicative instrument, but also involves an entirely different and intrusive (invasive) orientation to knowledge and interpretation. In many post-colonial societies, it was not the English language which had the greatest effect, but writing itself” (Ashcroft 82). Thomas King’s novel diagnoses the symptoms of such media effects from a variety of perspectives. The parodic rewriting of Biblical narratives in the ongoing dialogue between the narrator and Coyote, for example, is not only a theological critique of the ways in which “the monotheist ver- sion of creatio ex nihilo — creation of the earth from nothing — achieves its singular and univocal status only by suppressing all other voices in this highly contested terrain” (Donaldson 32). It is also an assessment of the profound impact of the book on indigenous populations. As the narrator attempts yet another cyclical telling of the Creation — this time featuring GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER 25 Old Woman — he is interrupted by Coyote’s strategic double-tracking/ trouble-making which brings to light the clash between voice and letter: “Well,” I says, “Old Woman falls into that water. So she is in that water. So she looks around and she sees — ” “I know, I know,” says Coyote. “She sees a golden calf!” “Wrong again,” I says. “A pillar of salt!” says Coyote. “Nope,” I says to Coyote. “A burning bush!” says Coyote. “Where do you get these things?” I says. “I read a book,” says Coyote. “Forget the book,” I says. “We’ve got a story to tell. And here’s how it goes.” (291; emphasis added) It is precisely such an impossible forgetting of the book and a reclaiming of the voice that the characters in King’s novel must hazard in their attempts to recover from the epistemic, as well as the material, violence of the colonial encounter. By shifting the focus from the message to the medium, Coyote and the narrator begin to suggest that colonial aggression and Native resistance are played out — at least in part — in the clash of systems of mediation. Yet King’s rendition of the encounter between “oral” and “literate” cultures is far more complex than the binary opposition between reading and telling in the narrator’s retort to Coyote might suggest. As numerous critics have shown, King’s novelistic critique of writing as a form of epistemic violence is of necessity hybrid and syncretic rather than simply oppositional. Echoing King’s own theory of a Native “interfusional literature … that blends the oral and the written” (“Introduction” xii), for instance, Dee Horne argues that Green Grass, Running Water “combine[s] elements of the Aboriginal oral tradition with the settler novel genre to re-present it as a creative hybrid text” (260). Marlene Goldman concurs and aptly locates the literary progenitors of such “polyphonic” writing in the novel’s many references to the Fort Marion ledger art, suggesting that, “in keeping with the warrior-artists who first appropriated ledger books King has likewise created a palimpsest — a work that both recognizes and draws ‘over the space of foreign calculations’” (26). King’s writing, in other words, like the works of the ledger artists, attests to a potentially productive and regenerative relationship between the technologies of colonization and the poetics and politics of indigenous resistance and cultural expression. 26 SCL/ÉLC King’s ability to “adopt and adapt” invasive colonial technologies into “repositories for Native wisdom and tradition” on the one hand, and “gesture[s] of defiance and self-assertion” on the other (Goldman 29, 25), has accurately been read by Horne, Goldman, and Herb Wyile, among others, as a riposte to the exponents of an unreconstructed politics of cultural authenticity who, like Clifford Sifton in Green Grass, Running Water, insist that “real Indians” do not “drive cars, watch television, [or] go to hockey games” (119). Yet King’s endorsement of hybridized forms like the “interfusional” novel exists in tension with a clear desire to sustain, recu- perate, and celebrate indigenous cultural forms as well. Indeed, one of King’s principal objections to the term “postcolonial” is its implication that Native culture is defined in toto by an opposition to colonization.1 As Wyile has convincingly argued, King’s fiction “serves as an example of how we have to balance our appreciation of cultural difference and concerns about appropriation and misrepresentation with a respect for the individuality of the writer” (121), which, in the case of King, means recognizing that “both dominant and non-dominant cultures … are not only much more het- erogeneous and much less self-contained than many expressions of multiculturalism suggest, but [that] they are also ultimately provisional, the result of rather than the source of social and cultural practice” (107-08). Thus King’s literary and cultural project involves not simply a celebration of hybridity, but an informed and nuanced defence of cultural difference — though not “authenticity,” in the regressive liberal sense. Such complex cultural politics require a delicate balancing act, which King carries off in Green Grass, Running Water by complementing images of hybrid repre- sentational forms, such as the ledger art, with a more direct critique of colonial media and a consequent valorization of indigenous cultural pro- ductions like the sun dance. So far, King’s critics have tended to confine their readings of how the novel both exposes the impact of settler media on Native peoples and reworks that violent legacy of colonial hybridization to a consid- eration of orality and writing. Goldman in particular has brilliantly deconstructed the colonial opposition between “oral” and “literate” societies with reference to an indigenous tradition of inscription — a form of polyphonic map-making that operates in concert with “oral storytell- ing, chanting, dancing” to “interrupt and contest the linear trajectory of the printed word” (29). Indeed, it is by now widely recognized that “King’s fiction examines the reliance of western culture on a teleological narrative structure — epitomized and conveyed primarily by the Bible — and engages in modes of figuration other than those the linear narrative se- GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER 27 quences seem to be driving forward” (Goldman 30). Such a focus on King’s ambivalent critique of the technology of the book has yielded important insights, but King’s equally nuanced examination of other forms of Western media has been less thoroughly explored. Critics gen- erally agree that the novel opposes the technology of “genocidal annihi- lation” to ancestral “cultural heritage” (Donaldson 39) and that King thereby “critiques technology and the notion of progress” in general, and critiques the ways in which “settler society uses progress and technology to exclude and exploit others” in particular (Horne 266). But such ob- servations require considerable elaboration given the novel’s pervasive concern with the ongoing struggle over the means of communication and the sociopolitical effects of modern media as well as electric media’s his- torical antecedents. Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan provides a valuable perspective on such concerns, for in his “footnote” to Harold Innis he explored in depth “the psychic and social consequences of writing and then of printing” (McLuhan, “Introduction” ix). He was well aware of the cataclysmic impact that resulted from the encounter between oral and literate societies, and even argued that “submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action of all our technology” (Understanding 31). But McLuhan also drew attention to the psycho-social effects of electric media (television in particular) which are at the heart of Green Grass, Running Water. For instead of that scene — whose insistent repetition in the literature of colonialism both exasperated and fascinated Homi Bhabha — “of the sudden and fortui- tous discovery of the English book” (102), Green Grass, Running Water stages a very different technological encounter between an unscrupulous television salesman and four Indian tricksters (who, although media- savvy, play “Indyun”): Bursum lined the old Indians up in front of The Map. He stood off to one side and waved the remote in a circle and then hit the button. “Ah,” said the Lone Ranger as the screens came to life. “That’s very beautiful.” “Yes,” said Ishmael. “Everything is so silver.” “And bright,” said Hawkeye. “Everything is nice and bright.” “Boy,” said Robinson Crusoe, “can you do that again?” “Sure,” said Bursum, and he turned The Map off and then on again several times. “That’s amazing,” said the Lone Ranger. “What else does it do?” (250) 28 SCL/ÉLC The wryness of the humour here should not detract from the force of the question — “what else does it do?” — which resonates ominously throughout the novel.

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